After helping Node deliver world-class customer success for nearly 3 years – our CEO has asked if I would be interested in leading broader Business Operations affectionately known as “BizOps” together with Customer Success & Customer Operations!
The updated responsibilities make sense for our business on two levels: 1) as we have shifted from our first product iteration – a services-heavy SaaS solution to a more developer-focused platform leveraging our API directly, the need for traditional SaaS Customer Success has lessened to some degree and 2) I’ve had the opportunity through leading Customer Success (including Onboarding/Implementation & Support) to operationalize performance across all functions and facilitate a better customer experience.
I’ve been a General Manager previously in my career for rapidly scaling start-ups – so my first step was to define exactly what the BizOps leadership role would look like at Node. This isn’t as easy as it sounds – if you were to ask 50 leaders for their definition of the Business Operations function (or even a General Manager function) – you will likely receive 50 different answers.
After much discussion within our team at Node, we believe there are (3) key areas where strong Business Operations can have a tremendous impact as the organization scales:
-Cultivating collaboration
-Pushing for efficiency and progress (data-driven)
-Testing and championing new functional solutions
Ultimately I think leading BizOps is much like being a General Manager, except a bit more proactive, particularly in a rapidly evolving company. Unlike a pure Operations capacity role which might be focused on helping connect departments for efficient delivery of product – BizOps takes a wider view across all functions to help drive efficiency and planning leveraging the capabilities of a high-performance generalist.